We were touring on our last record Ice Station (2007, FLAMESHOVEL), and spent several weeks on the road in our van the Black Boat frying in the Southwestern sun in places like Pecos, Abilene, Gila Bend, Imperial Sands, Needles… Exhausted late one night we tried to find a motel room near Odessa. Without so much as looking up from her tabloid the prickly front desk clerk of the lone motel in town says, “Everyone’s looking for a room tonight, son. We got all kinds of men, Oil Men, Machinery Men, Construction Men, Company Men and Sorry Suckers like you. There ain’t no vacancies. You won’t find anyplace short of El Paso.”

Hours later and a hundred miles from anywhere and damn if that clerk wasn’t telling the truth. We wound up flat on our backs pulled over and delirious on the side of Highway 10 in West Texas staring up at shooting stars during the Perseid meteor showers. That night under the widescreen sky the idea for Exiles came about – it’d be a kind of Judeo-Goth-Electric-Western, conflating the Acid Westerns and Road Films of the 60’s and 70’s, with the Old Testament fire and brimstone of long ago. A couple of days later in Tucson over tequila I put pen to paper for the song Clack and headed West from there.

Back home I found inspiration in the photography of Edward Curtis, Richard Avedon and the Farm Security Administration, the stories of Moses and his followers and T.E Lawrence, the films of Warren Oates, Dennis Hopper, Peckinpah, Malick, Jodorowsky, Hellman, Roeg, and in the sounds of Country, Blues and German Electronic music.

I took all the images I could find and collaged the walls of my shitty little studio - a Blue Room packed floor to ceiling, without a window, paint chipped and crackling and a busted ceiling fan. I spent a Chicago Winter ritualistically holed up in there - projecting myself into a burning world. By day I was making exhibits at the Chicago Public Library. After work I’d stick around and look for source material. When I got home I’d eat the same meal every night then get to it. My bandmate Alfredo Nogueira would come over and play his silver slide and help arrange what fell out. We used a lot of those bits we recorded then on the album. The rest was laid down later with Josh Eustis from Telefon Tel Aviv on the boards at Benelli Sound Labs, the studio he shares with Alfredo. It’s our 2nd record together. We came up with a palette of sound – crusty synthesizers, broken guitars, machinedrums, cave vocals, ran it to tape and out came with this record.

Exiles is meant to be an over-the-top experience… sonically, lyrically and thematically conjuring the desert, its dunes, mirages and holy mountains and the outsized personalities of the outlaws, searchers, escapists, wanderers, drifters, pariahs, prophets, misfits, mystics, miscreants and all the other sorry suckers who’ve called the dusty road home. As dark and serious as it may all sound it was a hell of a lot of fun to make and we hope an enjoyable listen.

Vampire Hands: Hannah In The Mansion
implies, the music sounds weathered, a faded version of some original we might only imagine. As a record of covers, it sounds like the sonic palimpsest that it is exactly. On "Colorloss", one finds a humble treatment of the hierarchy of sounds. It is the equal attention given to each sound and its place in the mix that makes this a true musical democracy where each element shines in its own way, while propping up the others in a puzzle that would charm Archimedes. A wash of fuzz finds itself meandering thru a track holding hands with the vocals, the space between a breathe before the next submergence. What we have as a result is work of such staggering beauty and melodic thoughtfulness to stop Kevin Shields in his tracks at the wonder of it. And while the instrumentation and means might be different, this is a music that has as much in common with late 20th-century composition in the vein of John Cale or Tony Conrad as it does with the soundscapes of William Basinski or My Bloody Valentine.

Linfinity: Live at Marcata: Demos
rattle and stick of a genuinely human kind, Anemones are all deep throb, jangled buzz, ambient drone, shiftless mumbling and, perhaps mostimportantly, rolling waves of reverberation so pronounced and significant as to be structurally necessary. Collected and combined, these elements make a warm, oceanic, somewhat totalizing music that operates inwardly, directed towards the uniquely fertile, semi-liquid quasi-agriculture of the mind. Activated this way, mind as such is here suspended, ala Descartes, as a kind epiphenomenal hazy feeling, a ghost between the ears. Both in and out of the body, this half-consciousness invokes a persistent, low-key dream-like psychedelic break in which the normal world itself becomes hypnotically elusive and mysterious, a pleasantly dislocating transformation enhanced by Anemones' minimalist, somewhat lock-groove languorousness and nonchalantly sardonic theatricality. But although often performatively 'druggy' in character, Anemones' music isn't therefore 'about drugs' in the sense of being 'about being made by means of drugs' or even 'about being made for or on behalf of drugs', as if simply copying such important stylistic and conceptual precursors as the Velvet Underground, Suicide, Spacemen 3 and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Rather, Anemones produce a kind of 'post drug' music, which here refers to a state of 'after-ness' and not prudish abstention or dumbbell reform. In fact this is a specific aesthetic strategy: after the drugs and drinks are long done and gone, sound itself remains the psychotropic trigger par excellence. Hence, altering perception, Anemones aim to turn listeners on ears first.